Friday, February 1, 2013

Air Brushing with Sandy for Off the Wall Friday

Well I'm happy to say that after I had to admit publicly that that I was unproductive, I did manage to put my big girl pants on and get after it. I spent most of the week working on Signs, Signs. The second block is nearly stitched and the third is designed. So I'm all happy with that.

Along those lines, I wanted to start on the background of the quilt. For that I needed the help of my artist friend Sandy Shelenberger. Now Sandy is a great surface designer and she really knows her stuff. Not to mention she has the stuff. And what stuff is that???? She has her very own air brushing booth. So she spent an afternoon teaching me how to air bush. Needless to say it was very fun.

So here's the scoop!

First of all we took a piece of Testfab's 419 pfd fabric and pinned it to a board in her spray booth. Sandy uses Dye-na-flow paints --- she has a crate of them! We mixed bronze, brick and brown with a bit of green to get the right shade of muddy bronze I was looking for.

Then we donned our masks, and she showed me how to push down and back to make air and paint go through the gun at at the same time. It wasn't too hard to master a straight line - applying the right pressure and speed of the hand. It was a lot easier than I thought anyways.

I first laid down wet lines of water as guide lines and to help the paint spread a bit. I then sprayed a wall like grid of paint not worrying too much about things being even. Still the over all canvas was way too white so we then added in an overall coating of pewter. Much better.

This is just a little bit of my wall - its not quite done!

As it dried, I started to look at fonts to help me make a thermofax of the wording that is going to go on the wall. OMG did you know that there are whole sites with tons of cool fonts on them just waiting to be down loaded? I'm still browsing Fontspace looking for just the right one! Our next step is for me to pick a font, blow it up to the right size, play with positioning of the text and then using the thermofaxed stencil to paint it on the wall. Cool huh?!

Yeah - once again it bares repeating - this whole little on the side, stitch project has gotten totally out of hand.

This is going to sound really stupid - but I have an airbrush for makeup!! I wonder if I could use it for fabric paint??? I got it off of Ebay and it's ancient...and looks more like something you would use for actual paint...see once upon a time I wanted to be a hairstylist/makeup artist. LOL* :)